this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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According to their website, Publications owned by GAMURS Group include:

Destructoid

The Escapist

Siliconera

Twinfinite

Dot Esports

Upcomer

Gamepur

Prima Games

PC Invasion

Attack of the Fanboy

Touch, Tap, Play

Pro Game Guides

Gamer Journalist

Operation Sports

GameSkinny

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is fucking gross. There’s no one who thinks people will read the mass shit they pump out.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A lot of sites like these are already just click farms with “articles” consisting of a headline and a couple poorly-researched sentences. Switching to AI probably won’t significantly change the quality of what they’re churning out.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Right. That’s why searching for anything on the internet SUCKS these days. The results are all just filler bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Something to keep in mind is that these companies aren't concerned with total profit or revenue or anything like that - it's all about the percentage. I suspect in the short term, these AI-articles will look very profitable. Networking effects, consumer habits, and SEO will carry the day for a time.

But what always screws these MBA types is the inability to recognize the specific natures of their business and the second order effects. Not all costs are representable on a spread-sheet.

Basically, the second order to me really boils down to this: AI generated content isn't really a 'brand'. Good writing shops tend to build a following with their writers and expectations with their editors. The writing, investigative, and editorial bent of a house is essentially what makes a shop. See The Economist and The New Yorker as examples. In other places, a lot of niche shops are selling personality as much as product with youtube, podcasts, and others.

this means there is no real 'value add' someone like an AI shop can provide. You are throwing yourselves down the hole of becoming a pure commodity, and as every business major knows, being a commodity sucks. Short term profitable, but literally no one cares about where a mass produced nail comes from and its a race to the bottom of price.

So, as time goes on, with the barrier for entry being incredibly low, every bill and joe who fancies themselves an SEO wizard has no reason to not jump in, so your competition rises and your ability to charge some value for (ads?) drops a lot. But that's the tip of the iceberg. Many of the companies that would occupy this brandless, commodity-filling space are way better positioned to make a run at it than the GAMURS Groups of the world. Microsoft's Bing chat and (probably soon to follow Bard) will whip your ass in the long-game. Why search Bing to get an AI article from the Escapist when Bing will do it for me? I really doubt anything churned out by an AI with some edits will be that much better per convenience.

This whole could easily collapse in on itself. Like a lot of people in the AI space, I'm interested to watch what happens when AI begins to consume and be built on its own content.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Basically, the second order to me really boils down to this: AI generated content isn’t really a ‘brand’. Good writing shops tend to build a following with their writers and expectations with their editors. The writing, investigative, and editorial bent of a house is essentially what makes a shop. See The Economist and The New Yorker as examples. In other places, a lot of niche shops are selling personality as much as product with youtube, podcasts, and others.

Yep. This is why I've been a paying subscriber to Ars Technica for over a decade. You're exactly correct. Ditto with NPR.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The enshitification of the internet continues. How can we offer our content, but without having to pay anyone for it and at a much higher rate of delivery? By not giving a fuck about the quality anymore and not having any real competition so people have no choice. Except people always have a choice. We can walk away.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don't see why people would even go to a site to read AI generated articles and be bombarded with ads. I could just ask an AI to write an article for me? Just cut out the middle man at that point.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I don’t see why people would even go to a site to read AI generated articles and be bombarded with ads.

Doesn't have to be voluntary on the user's part. Maybe they clicked a link on Google? Or maybe a site they've been reading for ages suddenly switches to "AI editors" and it's never really announced to the users in a clear way

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Yep. Someone will make an app to generate click bait for you on the fly.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

I'm just waiting until these models get completely unraveled by training on output. The more people use generative AI to make stuff online, the more useless the internet is as a data source.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Considering how many blogs are just AI generated garbage now, it doesn’t surprise me that the big players are looking to automate their articles.

The issue is that AI can’t really create… it just remakes what it already knows and has seen before. No hot takes. No new ideas. Just whatever has been done before.

Hopefully this isn’t the new way everything goes…

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Also, Chat GPT at least still writes at the level of a somewhat talented ninth grader. Its prose is stilted, and the way it structures essays and stories is super formulaic.

It's absolutely not at the level it can replace a talented human writer yet. (I have no doubt that day is coming, probably sooner than we think, but it's not here yet.)

So publishers making the switch will see the quality of their content drop, and with it the number of clicks / revenue they get. Enough to offset the salaries of all the writers they fired? Probably depends on the publication. For clickbait farms, probably not, but the higher quality the readers are used to the more the publishers stand to lose.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

It doesn’t commit to anything either, its writing is absolutely full of weasel words and a detached perspective.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Destructoid; The Escapist; Siliconera; Twinfinite; Dot Esports; Upcomer; Gamepur; Prima Games; PC Invasion; Attack of the Fanboy; Touch, Tap, Play; Pro Game Guides; Gamer Journalist; Operation Sports *and GameSkinny.

Noted. I'm officially starting a "not reading your crap" list.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yep, time to just blackhole their DNS entries.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So now I know which sites to ignore completely from now on.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Probably wouldn’t hurt to blacklist links from sites known to produce only AI generated articles.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I want a ublock origin list for this.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Amen. I’ve already removed the ones listed above from my RSS reader (that I had subscribed to).

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Any service looking to replace human writers with ai is positioning itself for failure once generative ai becomes more mainstream. Once your average Joe can ask a native phone app for anything they want, the Only value of written text will be the human element.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yo, I don't mean to get all John Connor or anything, but we need to put a stop to and legislate against AI. Full stop.
We already see how it's being misused.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What would you legislate here? The publication clearly doesn't care about quality and paying some people to fill shitty, already pre programmed templates and using something like chatGPT seems like the same style of crap.

They were definitely not a safe source of labor.

Also, I'd caution against reactive takes of "legislation" when the politicians who can legislate usually don't understand the technologies and are simply trying to bundle stuff in for their lobbyist (who funds them) benefit. The same types who "want to ban encryption" or other myopic takes.

Stronger rights and guarantees around imbalances of power (not specifically related to tech either) would work much better than just reacting to an AI scare.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I know game journalists are memed on, but this is really disappointing. AI will eventually unravel and crap out because it's regurgitating AI content.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Will it eventually be AIs at the marketing firm telling the execs that their ads are successful because the AIs on the other side are 'reading' it for new training data on how to better optimize viewer attention span? Just two Ad companies paying each other back and forth?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I can't wait until The Escapist articles are all "Zelda Zelda Zelda Zelda ZeldaZeldaZeldaZeldaZeldaZeldaZelda Zelda Zelda Zelda Zelda Zelda"

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I wonder if this will end as poorly as that eating disorder hotline that did the same thing.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

At least this is less likely to hurt or kill people.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

... until someone will use an AI to generate a whole publication... or a whole set of them... or an entire publisher... or an entire holding owning the publisher...

I've just seen Black Mirror S06E01 yesterday night and it did hit deep

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Content farms have been polluting the web for years, to the point that search engines are near totally unreliable. But this new wave of AI-powered content farms, and even worse, AI-driven content from once respected and trustworthy orgs, is going to make things exponentially worse

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

One person to edit 250 AI articles per week? I'd be very surprised if they found them.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

“Editor”

Read 50 short articles each day and approve any that aren’t blatantly offensive.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just don't see ChatGPT being capable enough quite yet. These articles are going to be low quality, written in the same voice, and filled with factual errors. Not to mention released at a volume that nobody will bother to keep up with. Seems like self destruction on their part.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

An AI writer is always going to be trash. AI can't experience anything, only remix preexisting content. So it'll always be a regurgitation of what others have posted. But if we keep cutting out humans, then it'll eventually be nothing content on repeat.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Guess we now know why Nick from The Escapist was fired. They think GPT can do it better.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Sure, flush your websites reputation down the toilet. Good luck with that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

This juxtaposed with all the teachers failing students for using generative AI tells you a lot about the world we live in.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This may be a little tangential, but does anyone know of any game news sites with RSS feeds that have talented writers working for them? Some of the sites I've followed for years have been regurgitating Twitter opinions more and more, and it makes finding thoughtful (or just plain informative) articles far more difficult.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you like MMOs and other multiplayer games, https://massivelyop.com/ is very good. Talented writers funded by reader donations.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Ugh, not The Escapist. I mean you see a lot of AI written articles nowadays so it will only ramp up, but it's still bad.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

good luck with that, I think after a bit of time us gaming community needs our own domain white/blacklist just so we can filter our search result to the more writer/contributor friendly sites.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Destructoid was so good for so long. Between this and the fact that they started to bug me about my ad blocker, it's time for me to stop giving them views.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So... these sites are all just random text generators now? What's the point?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I used to love the escapist can't say I've gone there much since these guys took over

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

We as humans are already sensationalizing for clicks. I can’t imagine what content is going to look like even in the near future with AI at the reigns.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

These generative models are only capable of regurgitation. They're fed content, and they come up with statistical distributions of words and phraes in their training data to sample. But they're still just chopping up other people's copyrighted work and gluing it together.

This gets into generic "you can't copyright individual words" territory when dealing with very common topics, but when you get into niche topics, the training data gets sparse, and the distributions stop allowing for creating something new.

And they can't extrapolate beyond their data. All models break down once you leave the boundaries of the data.

So, any articles generated by these things about something new are either going to be trained on too small a data set to avoid lawsuits, or just be incredibly factually wrong.

And if they're publishing reviews of new games that are full of factual errors, they could get sued for defamation.

This is just stupidly risky on their part.

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